To Meet Mrs Crane
by bofoddity
Summary: Daphne and Roz prepare an Ouija-board to speak to Hestia Crane. Gen.


**Disclaimer:** Frasier isn't mine.

In a way, Daphne was already quite familiar with Niles's mother. Hestia Crane had died years before Daphne ever arrived in the Crane-household, but that hadn't meant that she was absent from the lives of the Cranes. The first times the Cranes ever spoke of her had been laced with the pain, especially when it came to Marty, but eventually that pain had faded to the point Cranes could talk about Mrs. Crane like she was still among them, and Daphne was sure that there was very little left that she didn't know about her.

Yet as she and Roz prepared Daphne's Ouija-board in Roz's living room to contact Mrs. Crane, Daphne was hesitant.

"Are you sure you want to do this?" she asked Roz, to remind herself that if she felt hesitant then Roz must have felt even more so. After all, unlike Daphne, Roz had little experience and knowledge about the ways of the supernatural, and as bold as Roz was, it would be very natural if she was nervous about dealing with the dead. But when Roz met Daphne's eyes she was smiling.

"Please, this isn't the first time I've contacted the underworld," Roz said, setting one candle on each side of the board, and indeed she seemed to be familiar with this. "In fact, once it told me I'd get a new boyfriend soon."

"Oh?"

"Yeah, it spelled out 'trouble' and he sure was that." Roz stood up and headed to the kitchen to get a glass, leaving Daphne to shiver by the living room table, wondering if she was alone or if Mrs. Crane had arrived already. She nearly started when Roz shouted from the kitchen: "Could you switch off the lights?"

"Sure," Daphne said, shaking her head a little before walking to the switch. All right, so all the anxiety was on her end after all, but could anyone blame her for that? No matter how much she knew about Mrs. Crane, Daphne had never met her in person, and while contacting her with an Ouija board was at least something, it could never match a meeting with the real woman. A woman who was Niles's mother, who surely had all sorts of hopes and expectations for the woman her son would spend the rest of his life with. Naturally Daphne was worried about what Mrs. Crane thought of her.

"You okay?"

She could feel Roz looking at her in concern, but even as she found the nonchalant words and a laughter that would make that concern go away, Daphne remained silent. She fiddled with the switch, almost pushing it down but not really, and after a heavy while of silence Roz approached her.

"Daphne," Roz said, "you do know that this is probably not going to work, right?"

As Daphne had suspected, Roz was a non-believer after all, and launching into an educational speech to fix that should have been easy. "Probably," Daphne said, blinking in confusion. She shrugged it off and continued: "Still, life is strange. Everything is possible. And what then?"

There was silence behind her. "It's a family meeting and Roz needs to get out?" Roz suggested, and Daphne pondered upon that.

"I don't know, I think she may have a few words to you." A grin sprung to her lips, and as hard as she tried to keep it down as she turned to Roz, she could feel it break loose. "About you and Frasier."

Roz scoffed. "Yeah, about why I don't do a better job keeping his head out of his ass." Roz was starting to grin too, but there was still a question in her eyes. "Still. Like you said, anything could happen. Do you want to risk meeting your mother-in-law?"

This time the words would have come out, she knew, but instead Daphne swallowed them down and nodded, flipping off the switch. As they walked back to the table she thought of Marty talking about Frasier and Niles taking much after their mother, and while Daphne had seen plenty of counter-evidence for that, she knew that Marty was right too. Beneath the layers of inherited Craneness and everything that was Niles and Niles alone, there was Hestia's heritage, adding its flavor to the strange mixture that was the man Daphne loved. Maybe all she could say to Mrs. Crane was a hello, but she wanted to say it.

"So we're supposed to use this, but how?" Roz asked, placing the glass she had been carrying tentatively on the board as they sat by it.

Daphne smiled. "Don't worry about it. Just follow my lead."


End file.
